Brokers serving national chains win top awards in retail category.

Many of this year's top-producing retail brokers relied heavily on business from big-name national retail chains to boost them to the head of their class.

The three-man team of Steven Soboroff, Michael Heslov and Ron Stockdale - all partners at Santa Monica-based Soboroff Partners and this year's top retail brokers relied on big-name retailers for much of their business between Oct. 1, 1994 and Sept. 30, 1995. The trio brokered 38 deals in the 12-month period, worth nearly $196 million.

Major clients of the three Soboroff partners include Circuit City Stores Inc., Office Depot Inc., Orchard Supply Hardware and Pep Boys Automotive Supercenters.

Soboroff Partners' major deals of the past year all involved their big-name clients, according to Heslov and Stockdale.

In one of the biggest single deals, the trio negotiated for two clients - Circuit City and Office Depot - to build and operate new stores on a piece of land across from the Fox Hills Mall in Culver City. The development is part of a recent trend for big-name retailers to buy land and develop build-to-suit stores from scratch, rather than lease existing buildings for their new stores, according to Heslov.

In addition to working on the Culver City development deal, the Soboroff trio also negotiated leases for 10 new Pep Boys stores and 10 Office Depots in and around the city of L.A. over the year.

"All these (big-name) retailers have already worked lilt suburbs, and the trend now will be to in-fill the cities proper. All of them are very hot on the Southern California market right now. They perceive that rents here are probably cheaper now than they were in the early 1990s," said Stockdale.

Sold on Sears

This year's No. 2-ranked retail broker, James S. Rosenfield of Santa Monica-based J.S. Rosenfield & Co., also relied heavily on a big-name retailing connection for more than half of his business. Rosenfield brokered 15 deals between Oct. 1, 1994 and Sept. 30, 1995, with a total value of $63.7 million.

In his case, Rosenfield's primary client was Sears Roebuck & Co. of Chicago. Of the 15 deals he brokered during the 12-month period, eight involved Sears, said Rosenfield.

"I'm in the process of trying to finish three or four more (Sears) deals by year end, and there will probably be a lot more in the coming year," he commented.

Specifically, he said, Sears' new hardware chain, Sears Hardware, plans to open its first stores in L.A. County next year. "The volume of my Sears work will probably double, triple or even quadruple next year. The bulk of the new activity will come from Sears Hardware coming into L.A.," he said.

As part of its other expansion plans in Los Angeles, Sears also recently agreed to purchase nine L.A. County store sites from Federated Department Stores Inc. The nine stores were formerly owned and operated by Broadway Stores Inc., which was purchased by Federated in October.

This year's third- and fourth-ranked retail brokers in L.A. County said some of their most significant transactions during the 12-month period ended Sept, 30, 1995 took place in Beverly Hills.

Beverly Hills deal

Matthew May, senior vice president at Beitler Commercial Realty Services in West L.A., said two of his biggest transactions for the period involved buildings in Beverly Hills. May was L.A. County's third leading retail broker this year, notching up 32 deals worth $58 million.

Most recently, May brokered the sale of a retail building at 9677 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills. The building, with 7,000 square feet of retail space, was sold by Encino-based Wilson Co., former owner of Wilson's House of Suede, and purchased by Beverly Hills Land Co. for $2.85 million.

In the second deal, May helped the Resolution Trust Corp. sell an entire one-block-long stretch of buildings along Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills to Rochelle Park, N.J.-based Century Properties Inc. for about $4.5 million in February. The block included one 16.000-square-foot vacant lot at 9404 Wilshire Blvd., and two vacant buildings at 9412 and 9424 Wilshire Blvd. In October, Century Properties sold all the properties to a partnership affiliated with Dallas-based Harwood Pacific Corp.

"The Beverly Hills Triangle is very hot right now, both for leasing and for sales," commented May. The Beverly Hills Triangle is bounded by Santa Monica and Wilshire boulevards and Doheny Drive, he said.

In a third major transaction during the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 1995, May also brokered a sale/leaseback deal in Stockton, Calif., for the electronics chain The Good Guys. In that deal, The Good Guys sold a 30,000-square-foot building which it owned and occupied to Commercial & Lease Realty, a real estate investment trust, for about $4 million. Commercial & Lease Realty agreed to continue leasing the building to Good Guys for the next 15 years as part of the deal.

"This was the first deal Good Guys did with a REIT. Since then, the Good Guys have built six more stores in the Pacific Northwest and are now in negotiations to sell them," said May.

Rally on Rodeo

Walter Hermann, vice president at Beverly Hills-based Lambert Smith Hampton and the No. 5-ranked retail broker in L.A. County for the year ended Sept. 30, 1995, said two of his biggest lease transactions in that period were also in the Beverly Hills Triangle. Hermann brokered 12 deals during the 12-month period, with a value of $55 million.

Both of Hermann's Beverly Hills deals involved retail spaces on Rodeo Drive. In the first deal, footwear retailer Diego Della Valle signed a 10-year lease for a 1,700-square-foot space at 333 N. Rodeo Drive. In the second, Franklin Mint signed a 10-year lease for a 3,300-square-foot space at 339 N. Rodeo Drive.

Hermann explained that Rodeo Drive has become one of the tightest retail markets in L.A. over the past year. "It's gotten to the point where we're buying out leases on the street (to get spaces for new tenants). Vacancies are in the single digits," he said.

In another major deal, Hermann brokered the sale of Crenshaw Coast Center, a shopping center in Torrance, for $12.2 million in June. In that deal, P/A Central Philadelphia Investors, a California limited partnership, sold the 70,000-square-foot center to Long Beach's Bay Shore Oil Co. - controlled by the local Dunlap family.

This year's No. 4-ranked retail broker, Robert E. Smith, vice president at the City of Industry office of CB Commercial Real Estate Group Inc., said some of his biggest deals from the past year came through his work as a landlord representative for two major shopping centers in L.A. County. Those two centers are the Marketplace at the Lakes in West Covina, which opened in the first quarter of 1995, and the Quad at Whittier, where a new section was recently added onto the pre-existing mall.

Smith helped negotiate leases for such big-name tenants as Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Best Buy and Linens 'N Things in Marketplace at the Lakes, and Ben Franklin, Orchard Supply Hardware and Famous Footwear in the Quad at Whittier.

"(Large shopping malls) are a very hot segment of the retail development scene today. if you can find a key piece of real estate with good freeway exposure and on a major cross street, then usually you can find retailers to go in," Smith said.